Margaret Mace Studies the Holocaust

The sixth grade students of Margaret Mace School recently completed a project in which they read a short biography of local Holocaust survivors as collected in Portraits of Resilience: Holocaust Survivors of South Jersey, 2nd ed.
Their teacher was Sheila McCloy-Nuss, a contributing author and photographer of Portraits of Resilience: Holocaust Survivors of South Jersey, 2″ Ed.
As the primary collector of nineteen of these oral histories, McCloy-Nuss feels motivated to responsibly steward the testimonies by incorporating them into Holocaust education.
McCloy-Nuss is a student art teacher attending Richard Stockton College of NJ and is working under cooperating teacher Kathy Nichols of Margaret Mace School.
Students were divided into small groups and assigned the biography of a local survivor. Student groups read the biographies together and then chose scenes to illustrate from each survivor’s life.
At the conclusion of the lesson, the students presented their illustrations to the class as a group, teaching their peers about the lives of their survivors through their artistic responses.
Copies of student drawings were sent to the survivors and several students asked to send letters to their survivor as well.
Some of the drawings were quite remarkable. Briana and Jillian both illustrated scenes from Agnes Lieberman’s life, “Agnes is selected for death but is spared to work in an airplane factory”, and “Agnes is sent back to Auschwitz again”, respectively.
Devin illustrated a scene from Celia Hershkowitz’s life, “Celia and her mother hid under the floorboards”.
Hannah, Jimmy and Savannah responded to Berl Lazarus’ biography, “The children developed a fear of feathers”, “Berl loses his entire family at Auschwitz” and “Berl immigrates to the U.S.”, respectively.
Hannah connected to the idea that the children developed a fear of feathers because they moved like ashes from the crematoria and divided her composition into a symbolically light and dark side with a child caught in between.
Jeffrey illustrated a scene from Morris Markowski’s life, “The U.S. did not accept refugees at that time”; it was interesting for the students to discover that early on, the U.S. did not accept Jewish refugees and as Jeffrey’s illustration shows, after Markowski’s family escaped to the U.S. they were put on trains and sent to Canada.
Paul illustrated the destruction of Betty Simon’s hometown in “Kaszian is destroyed”.